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Abstract
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The exploration of memory, loss, and recovery in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs is essential for understanding the complexities of traumatic temporality and the ethical demands of witnessing. This research examines how both novels dramatize trauma not as a singular event to be resolved, but as a recursive return—an unassimilated rupture that resists narrative closure—drawing centrally on Cathy Caruth’s theories of belatedness, narrative aporia, and the ethics of listening. Understanding these elements is critical for uncovering how literature bears witness to psychic and historical injury in ways that challenge redemptive paradigms of healing (Empirical Truths 23). As Caruth emphasizes, “Trauma is not what one knows, but what returns as if for the first time—and this return is the event’s survival” (Empirical Truths 4), a claim that anchors the formal and ethical innovations of both Barker and McEwan.
In Regeneration, repressed memory functions as the primary conduit through which historical violence infiltrates the psyche. Characters like Billy Prior and Siegfried Sassoon manifest trauma somatically—through aphasia, paralysis, and nocturnal reenactments—exemplifying what Khairani and Widyastuti term “embodied latency”: trauma that persists not in conscious memory, but in the body’s involuntary repetitions (312). This reflects Caruth’s notion of temporal collapse, where past and present coexist without synthesis (Empirical Truths 58). As Smith and Lee argue, “The clinical setting in Regeneration exposes how institutional therapy often seeks to normalize trauma, converting dissent into diagnosable pathology” (46), revealing how social structures govern whose suffering is legible.
In Black Dogs, June’s encounter with the black dogs—situated amid postwar ideological ruin—functions as what Hirsch identifies as a “postmemory wound”: trauma inherited affectively, yet profoundly real (Hirsch 2023, 118). Jeremy’s attempt to reconstruct her story enact
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